Recently I had the opportunity to reconnect with a former colleague, Eric Roth, who is serving as VFX Supervisor on a short film being made in collaboration with USC Film School. He invited me to participate in post production vfx work as well as assisting in data acquisition on set. For me it was a great excuse to get to see Pixomondo’s new LED volume. The volume utilizes Sony’s Crystal LED displays which you can read more about here: Crystal LED BH displays
The volume is located at Sony Pictures in Culver City on a sound stage managed by Pixomondo and built/financed by Sony Innovation Studios. Sony Pictures Virtual Production Stage
The shoot also provided an opportunity to test out Cooke cinema prime lenses, as well as the latest Sony Venice digital cameras, with revised firmware and features, including LED volume sync to mitigate flickering issues associated with filming a digital display.
Sony Venice cameras
The stage is being used to create the virtual locations for Europa. If you’re a bit of an astronomy/space buff you’ll know this is one of the moons of Jupiter, which has been theorized to have a liquid ocean beneath its icey surface. As a result the focus of the environment centers around creating a large ice cave environment, as well as the lunar surface.
In addition to visiting set, I also got to take some of the props to be scanned by The Scan Truck as a part of my informal duties as ‘vfx data wrangler’. They’re known for their work on For All Mankind in scanning and photogrammetry of assets, so of course they were the right choice to scan and capture data on the costumes, which were replica astronaut suits. Work will be done in post to replace and/or augment the helmet, particularly the visor to reflect the surrounding environment. Over the course of a few hours they completed full lidar scans of the helmets as well as texture acquisition. They supplemented this data with a full 360 capture of the helmets in their photogrammetry setup, comprised of dozens of Canon slr cameras mounted on a cage setup inside their truck. The setup is fully portable, intended to drive on to shooting locations.
Snapshot of the helmet inside the photogrammetry capture cage.
More to come as production wraps over the next few weeks and the team moves into post production work.